SARChI Reaction Engineering

The Research Chair in Reaction Engineering was established in 2018. Reaction engineering encompasses a wide field spreading over the different length and time scales. At the micro-scale, reaction engineering focuses on the detailed kinetic analysis of reactions at play within the chemical reactor, which need to be incorporated with the appropriate flow patterns to design and predict behaviours of reactors. The ultimate aim is to put the reactor with the appropriate operating window in an efficient, controllable overall process.

The research focuses on reaction engineering problems linked to processes of interest to the South African economy, i.e. Fischer-Tropsch synthesis, selective methane oxidation, oxygen reduction reaction, and CO₂ reduction. The operating window for these reactions using detailed reaction kinetic networks will be explored. For this purpose, micro-kinetic models for these transformations are being developed. Our on-going work has shown that the incorporation of lateral interactions will be essential in these models if they are to be used to predict kinetic behaviour under industrially relevant conditions. The data going into the micro-kinetic models for the chosen reactions will be calculated using the now-standard DFT-methods. The validity of the input data will be compared with existing surface science measurement and their importance will be evaluated using a degree-of-control analysis.

The obtained insights obtained from micro-kinetic analyses will be used to explore new operating regimes, i.e. pressure, temperature, and catalyst composition, for the reactions of interest, viz. Fischer-Tropsch synthesis, CO₂ hydrogenation, methane oxidation, oxygen reduction reaction (ORR), and CO₂ reduction. Hence, the chair will, in addition to the development of micro-kinetic models, perform experimental studies to explore variation in the operating window on the obtained activity and selectivity for the chemical transformations of interest. In particular, the chair will investigate catalytic active materials and promoters which may shift the operating window more towards a desired window of operation from an overall process point of view.